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Yes, David Barton had entitled his book The Jefferson Lies with absolutely no sense of irony whatsoever. Remarkable.

Casey Francis Harrell, the director of corporate communications at the publishing firm, said that, due to a spate of recent complaints, Thomas Nelson had “lost confidence in the book’s details.” The Jefferson Lies, a New York Times bestseller, has been pulled from Thomas Nelson’s website, and the company has asked online retailers to cease offering the work to the public. The cessation came only two days after NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a stinging commentary of Barton’s work.

Barton told Thomas Kidd of World Magazine that the publisher’s decision was a “strange scenario,” and that he’d only been notified of the move by email.

The book, which purports to illuminate Jefferson’s Christian leanings and the biblical influence on the Constitution’s creation, has been the subject of critique from much of academia since its release earlier this year, such that the History News Network deemed the book the “least credible book in print.” However, unlike many of Barton’s previous offerings, the averse reaction to The Jefferson Lies has crossed the political and religious spectrum.

On Aug. 13, the Kentucky legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education held a hearing. It was a very sorry affair indeed.

Four years ago, Kentucky legislators voted to tie the state’s testing program to national education standards, reported the Lexington Herald-Leader. But now some of them are having second thoughts because the national science standards stress (gasp!) evolution.

“I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution,” Sen. David Givens (R-Greensburg) told the newspaper.

Rob Boston elsewhere in the article:

Vincent Cassone, chairman of the University of Kentucky’s Biology Department, told the Herald-Leader, “The theory of evolution is the fundamental backbone of all biological research. There is more evidence for evolution than there is for the theory of gravity, than the idea that things are made up of atoms, or Einstein's theory of relativity. It is the finest scientific theory ever devised.”.....

top-flight public universities don’t bother to give “balanced treatment” to science and fundamentalist religion masquerading as science. They teach what the evidence shows to be factual: evolution.

Kentucky legislators have a choice. They can instruct the state’s public schools to acknowledge this reality and retain evolution in the science standards, or they can continue down the path of constitutional disaster and scientific illiteracy. They can support sound science or continue throwing tax money at creationist “Ark Parks” and ensuring that the commonwealth’s young people are left behind in a technology-based world economy.

Ray Flynn, who along with four other former U.S. Ambassadors to the Vatican endorsed Mitt Romney way back in January, is now appearing in a television ad for Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). Flynn, a former mayor of Boston, who is described as a Democrat in the ad, has not endorsed a Democratic candidate for president since Bill Clinton, and endorsed Scott Brown for the late Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat over Democrat Martha Coakley.

But there is much more to Ray Flynn's political involvements than his Republican endorsements. He would probably rather we forget, but he has also been a leader of the Religious Right.